Amazon Fire HD 8 Review

Table of Contents

Introduction, Design & Features

Holiday shoppers have an abundance of inexpensive tablets to choose from in the 2015 shopping season. Not the least of them: a trio of new Amazon Fire tablets to choose from, which augment the company's already wide line.

The smallest model of the bunch is the most intriguing. That's the capable, but surprisingly cheap, 7-inch Amazon Fire, which costs just $49.99 and holds the bottom end of the line. Meanwhile, the roomy, first-ever 10-inch Fire, dubbed the Fire HD 10, is the biggest of the new crew, and the biggest Fire tablet yet. (The HD 10 is $229.99 list, though it was on sale at this writing for $199.99. We’re in the process of reviewing that one.)

In this review, we’ll pay some attention to the middle child of the 2015 family, the 8-inch Amazon Fire HD 8. It’s available in two trim lines based on storage capacity: $149.99 with 8GB of onboard storage, or $169.99 for the 16GB model we received for review. (As with the other Fires and Amazon’s Kindle e-readers, at those entry prices, the tablet displays ads on its lock screens; you can pay $15 extra to avoid seeing these.)

These three new Fire tablets join the 2014 Fires, most of which are still available for sale: the $69.99-list Amazon Fire HD 6, with its 6-inch display, the Fire HD 7 (as the name suggests, a higher-resolution model than the 2015 version), and the Fire HDX 8.9. Plus, there are Kids Editions of both the 2015 7-inch Fire and the 2014 6-incher, which come with a anti-shock bumper and a replacement policy.

One thing is clear from this year’s Fires to 2014’s: Amazon went for the pricing jugular. The Fire HD 8 and the other 2015 tablets take a step down in relative pricing and display quality compared with the 2014 Fires. The 2014 Fire HDX 8.9 ($429.99), Amazon’s flagship tablet, has a resolution of 2,560x1,600 on its 8.9-inch display, and the Fire HD 7 ($129.99) is 1,920x1,200. The 2015 Fire HD 8 and 10, in contrast, are far back at 1,280x800, and the 2015 Fire 7-inch is at a modest but sufficient 1,024x600.

Clearly, Amazon made a calculation after two years of resolution increases that most folks can't tell the difference, or at least are willing to trade it off, in some cases, for a much lower price. “Lower the price (and the resolution, if you must), and we’ll be happy,” Amazon’s customers must have said.

This strategy makes sense to us, and we expect the 2015 Fires to be a hit. (The 7-incher certainly was on Black Friday and around it.) Rather than compete with the highest-end (and highest-priced) iOS and Android models (such as the $399 Apple iPad Mini 4, the $399.99 Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 8.0, and the $435 Sony Xperia Z3 Tablet Compact), Amazon lowered the Fires’ display resolution just enough to make the price attractive to its prime (especially Amazon Prime) customers, the ones who just want to sit back and consume Amazon’s movies, music, and books, rather than play advanced games or do work.)

And Amazon’s Fires are a good deal for those consumers. The Fire HD 8 is plenty sharp and vibrant for all but picky movie buffs or bookworms. Its display resolution isn't cutting-edge, but the display is no slouch. It’s equipped with in-plane switching (IPS) technology, which prevents colors from washing out, even from off-center viewing angles. (Notably, it’s good for watching movies with friends.) Moreover, the display is surfaced with sturdy Gorilla Glass, and Amazon asserts the Fire HD 8 is almost twice as drop-proof as Apple’s iPad mini 4, which costs more than twice as much. And, as we’ll get into in a bit, with stereo speakers boosted by Dolby’s Atmos technology, a MicroSD slot that can hold an extra 128GB of content, and the benefits of Amazon’s ecosystem (particularly for parents and Prime members), the Fire HD 8 has a lot to offer.

True, the Fire HD 8 isn’t the cheapest 8-inch tablet out there. For example, you can get full access to more than a million pure-Android apps in Google Play (versus about a quarter of that in Amazon’s Appstore) with the less-expensive Lenovo Tab 2 A8-50 ($99.99) or the similarly priced Acer Iconia Tab 8 ($159.99, down from $199.99). Moreover, while movie watching is better on displays that are 8 inches and above, you may be happy enough with a 7-inch display. If you’re an Amazon customer (especially an Amazon Prime member) and on a tight budget, take a long, hard look at the $49.99 7-inch Fire tablet. For basic Amazon-centric needs, it's almost too cheap to ignore.

If Amazon drops the Fire HD 8’s price to $99, we’d probably call for a stampede. But even at $149.99, the Fire HD 8 is a considerable value for first-time tablet shoppers and Amazon customers (especially Amazon Prime members) who want a well-built device for consuming music and movies. It ain't an iPad Air or iPad Mini, but the price isn't close to those, either.

Design & Features

The first time you hold the Amazon Fire HD 8, you may be struck by its 16:10 wide-screen aspect ratio, which makes its rectangular shape (8.4x5 inches) seem unusually narrow versus the relatively square iPads. Amazon asserts this yields a 15 percent increase in viewing area versus the iPad Mini 4. Even so, we found the Fire HD 8’s length a bit more difficult to manage and grip in portrait mode, especially when compared with the Lenovo Yoga Tablet 3 8 we recently test-drove. (That 8-inch tablet has a battery-chamber spine along one edge that shifts the slate’s center of gravity, like a rolled-open magazine.)

Still, the Fire HD 8 isn’t clunky. At three-tenths of an inch thick, it’s just a few whiskers thicker than the 0.24-inch iPad Mini 4. Surprisingly, due to its thinness, it’s as light as the 7-inch 2015 Fire: just 11 ounces. It’s also about as light as its 8-inch peers, such as the Asus ZenPad S 8.0 and the Apple iPad Mini 4, and a quarter-pound lighter than the Lenovo Yoga Tablet 3 8.

The front face of the Fire HD 8 is standard fare for tablets these days, with a black, glossy bezel under the glass, and a Webcam centered on one short side of the bezel. But the back side is unusual. It comes in your choice of three remarkably bright colors (blue, magenta, or tangerine, the last being the color of our test model), as well as black.

While the back is slick plastic with the feel of glossy enamel, featuring the Amazon logo in silver, the outer rim of the Fire HD 8 has a faintly rough texture. Although we will complain that the back is too slippery—it’s so glossy that your fingertips can’t help but slide—we’ll give it a pass. The color and feel reminded us of plastic toys from the 1970s.

Plus, the gloss wasn’t an issue if we used Amazon’s $39.99 protective cover, which proved handy. It clipped on snugly, covering the shiny back, and featured a magnetic sleep/wake lid whose foldable, origami-inspired cover corner propped the Fire HD 8 up in portrait or landscape mode. If you’ll use the Fire HD 8 on the road, or your domicile has hardwood or cement floors, you may want to invest in the cover.

Fire covers have been known to muffle the speakers, but that wasn't the case here. And that would have been a shame. While many slates have tinny-sounding speakers that would send an audio engineer home in tears—nay, the 2015 7-inch Fire has just one speaker—the Fire HD 8 has rich-sounding speakers, located at the top and bottom of the long edge, to the left of the rear-facing VGA Webcam...

The speakers are enhanced by Dolby Atmos, which, as we heard with the Lenovo Yoga Tablet 3, produces a fairly good simulation of surround sound. You won't throw out your Bose gear, but you may be more tempted to fire up some Hendrix as you follow a recipe on the Fire for dinner.

As with the other 2015 Fires, all of the buttons are metal and located along the top edge, above the rear-facing Webcam. With the tablet face-down, as below, you'll find a power/sleep/wake button on the right, and volume up and down buttons on the left.

In between, there's a headphone jack and a micro-USB port for the enclosed USB cable (which is nicely accompanied by an AC-adapter cube for faster charging), as you can see in this close-up...

Holding the Fire HD 8 in portrait mode, we were thrilled to find a MicroSD slot at the top of the right edge. That’s a corner cut by most tablet and e-reader makers these days. Even better, it can support cards (sold separately) up to 128GB. This makes it easier to preload movies, books, and music when venturing into zones without Wi-Fi. Amazon does offer unlimited cloud storage for all photos created on your Fire, but the MicroSD is a nice extension, whether you purchase the Fire HD 8 with 8GB or 16GB.

In addition to the aforementioned VGA Webcam lens, the Fire HD 8 has a 2-megapixel camera on the back, in the upper-left corner, capable of taking 720p video. A late-model smartphone can surely do better than these lenses, but they're handy in a pinch.

Note that there's no HDMI port, which would have allowed a wired connection to an external display, such as a HDTV. The trend is for tablets to handle this wirelessly, and the 2015 Fires support Miracast, which lets Miracast-enabled displays mirror everything that’s on the Fire’s display. Also supported is Second Screen, Amazon’s answer to Google’s Chromecast and Apple’s AirPlay. It goes beyond Miracast to allow the Fire to multitask during playback. In other words, you can play a movie from the Fire HD 8 without fear of the display going to sleep or everyone seeing what Web pages you’re looking at during the show.